Egyptian authorities and the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) report that they have shut down StreamEast, the world’s largest illegal streaming network for live sports. Two suspected operators of the platform have been arrested.
StreamEast, which has been around since 2018, is a free, ad-supported streaming service that offers access to HD content from licensed broadcasters.
According to ACE, StreamEast operates 80 domains that collectively receive 136 million monthly visits. Over the past year, the platform attracted 1.6 billion visits, primarily from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the Philippines, and Germany.
The pirate platform offers illegal streams of football leagues, including the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A, Germany’s Bundesliga, France’s Ligue 1, Portugal’s Primeira Liga, and Major League Soccer (MLS). StreamEast also covered national team matches from the FIFA World Cup, UEFA Euro, and the UEFA Nations League, as well as the Copa América, and international club tournaments such as the UEFA Champions League and UEFA Europa League.
StreamEast also offers viewers the major American sports, including the NFL (American football), NBA (basketball), NHL (hockey), and MLB (baseball), as well as PPV broadcasts of boxing, MMA, and various motorsport events from around the world (such as Formula 1 and MotoGP).
The first signs of trouble for the pirate streaming platform appeared last week, when Reddit users began reporting problems accessing the site and that streams and chats weren’t loading.
Soon after that, ACE representatives stated that the platform’s operations were disrupted by Egyptian law enforcement authorities.
“The takedown of Streameast is a major victory for everyone who invests in and relies on the live sports streaming ecosystem,” ACE commented. “This criminal operation siphoned revenue from sport at all levels and put fans around the world at risk.”
According to the New York Times, two people were arrested in Egypt’s Giza governorate. Police seized their laptops, smartphones, cash, and several bank cards.
It is reported that investigators linked the streaming service to a shell company based in the UAE that had allegedly been used since 2010 to launder $6.2 million in advertising revenue, as well as $200,000 in cryptocurrency.
Eighty domains previously owned by StreamEast now redirect visitors to ACE’s Watch Legally site, which contains links to legal platforms.
However, according to Torrent Freak, the operation by law enforcement and ACE did not affect the original Streameast, but instead dismantled a network of 80 clone domains that merely copied the Streameast “brand.” Meanwhile, the clones were generating even more pirate traffic than the original.
Representatives of the pirate service stated that they were in no way connected to these fake sites and added: “we’re not even Egyptians.”